Side-effects and Withdrawal

Symptoms

So after yesterday’s upbeat post about how I am feeling, I thought I should let folks know about why I stopped taking my meds and what the withdrawal symptoms are I am coping with.

To help out with the depression, the latest drug I tried was Paroxetine, a.k.a. Paxil. I was tired of what it was doing to me. It was somewhat effective that my days emotionally improved from about a 2 on average from 1-10 to about a 5. Though it came with a physical and a mental cost I decided was not worth the slight improvement in mood.

A big one was weight gain. I swelled up like a ballon and am fatter and so out of shape. I am bigger than I have ever been and it is affecting my health now too with high cholesterol, something just about unknown in my family. Needless to say, I don’t have much physical energy. I get pathetically winded very fast.

I feel that part of why I gained so much weight was that I became intensely apathetic. Nothing really mattered. It was a bad trade off that from depression came apathy. I didn’t care about anything: the state of my health, the state of the house, maintaining bonds with my friends, work, nothing. The house started to fall into ruin since joyxiii is not well enough from the fibro to do much work around the house. She has her hands full trying to make it through the day, let along try to maintain the house while her husband is in an apathetic hole. I didn’t do any house work since what was the point really. The yard is a mess with huge weeds, tall grass, and lots of dog poo. The inside is pretty messy to since I didn’t clean up very well after the puppy made his messes. Nothing really mattered and most of the time I just wanted to sit and stare at a wall and do nothing. What was the point in doing anything else really.

The apathy is the most likely cause of the weight loss. It also is a contributor to the third side effect that I severely disliked, but those are highly personal details one doesn’t just blog about. Take a wild guess about what personal stuff I wouldn’t blog about, and you’d be most likely correct.

Withdrawal

I was so apathetic, I didn’t even want to do anything about the side effects. Once again, why bother. On a weekend down to the parents house, we forgot my medication at home. It was only a 4 day weekend, and missing a few days for most meds wouldn’t be a huge issue. Unless that is the medication fucks with your mental state, then it goes downhill very fast. When you miss even one day of paroxetine, side effects can show up and be pretty hard to cope with. The drug only has a half life of around a day if I recall correctly, so the level in your body will fall fast if you miss a dose.

On the second day of missing the dose, some of the apathy went away enough for me to realize the drug was not worth it. I decided to go cold turkey off the medicine and just suffer through the withdrawal. My worry was that if I go back on paroxetine the apathy would return and my attempt to stop using it would go down the drain. So cold turkey was the way I went. It is a hard road.

The depression has started to come back. My days are getting back down to a 2 or 3 most of the time, but at least I am getting the drive back to retake responsibility of the duties I had been ignorning. Though the withdrawal still makes it hard.

Some of what I am fighting is insomnia, constant nausea, dizziness, hyper-real dreams on the verge of severe nightmares, and the worst is the zaps.

The zaps are a common part of SSRI withdrawal. Basically what a zap is is what it sounds like, a zap of electricity throughout the entire body. Kind of like an intense dizziness with the entire body shutting down for a split second. It’s disorienting and on bad days, it can happen as often as every few seconds. When I move my eyes, every time my eyes stop moving I get a zap. If I am exerting myself, I get constant zaps. They’re not painful in anyway, but are a major hurdle to overcome. It breaks your concentrating and makes reading down right impossible at times. When the latest Harry Potter book came out for example, I couldn’t read it. Every time I went to a new line in the book, zap. It was making me nauseous and made it down right impossible to keep engaged in the book. I eventually had to get the audio book to listen to so I could finish the series.

Dealing with everything is draining. Though I would rather suffer through this than still be on the drug.

State of the Bane

Currently the side effects are still with me. I have not taken paroxetine for about a month. From what I have read, they can last as little as a few days in some to months in others. I still have a long road to go. Wish me luck, I will need it.

Once I am over these, the next step is finding a better way to manage my depression. Drugs do have some utility in controlling it, but the side effects are not worth it. Therapy has not helped either. Something has to work, I only have to find it.